sometimes be found beneficial to apply in the neighborhood a plaster containing an irritating substance like mustard, the effect of which is often to change the disposition of the parts. In actual practice he recommends that the local measures should be employed first, and then, if they fail to accomplish the desired purpose, the physician should have recourse to those enumerated in the first class—the strictly metasyncritic remedies.
It is rather difficult to believe that a man so full of conceit and so unjust in his criticisms of his predecessors as Thessalus clearly was, could be capable of formulating such a concise statement of the nature of chronic ulcers and such a practical rule for their proper treatment. His development of the idea of "metasyncrisis"—or renovation of the body (recorporatio), as Caelius Aurelianus translates the word—seems to have been original with Thessalus.[1] The Methodists, it should be added, deserve special credit for having been the first to introduce and carry into effect the systematic treatment of chronic diseases; and, as a general proposition, it may be said that their treatment of all forms of disease was thoroughly practical, free from all tendency to resort to magical methods, and based largely on the employment of such hygienic measures as the use of baths of different kinds (hydrotherapy), massage, moderate outdoor exercise, passive movements, sea voyages, fasting, regulation of the diet, etc. One of the favorite practices—of which Thessalus was said to have been the originator—was to begin the treatment of almost all maladies by prescribing an abstinence from all food for a period of three full days. When I come to speak of Soranus and Caelius Aurelianus I shall probably have occasion to give further details regarding the methods of treatment employed by the Methodists.
As a system, says Neuburger, Methodism was not capable of inaugurating any fundamental advances in medicine; the most that it was able to accomplish was to broaden and
- ↑ The word "metasyncrisis," as we are assured by Le Clerc, was employed first by Cassius, one of the earlier disciples of Methodism, and then, long after the time of Thessalus, by Galen, Oribasius, Aëtius and Paulus Aegineta.
